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Thursday, February 25, 2016

Alternative Social Media

MeWe believes in the Right to Privacy

Social Media That Respects Privacy and Free Speech?

I stayed up way too late last night reading a really great book. Hoping to have the review for that up soon. But for today, picking up from yesterday's post about Twitter censorship, I want to talk a bit about social media.

Social media is like cell-phones. Once upon a time no one had cell phones and we were perfectly happy. Nowadays we won't leave the house without one. Today we are in a similar situation with social media. Honestly I'm not really a fan of it - the privacy trade-offs of being on Facebook hardly seem worth, and yet when my kid started college she found that unless she had a FB account she would have a hard time finding out what was going on. So she got a FB account. Then so did I, because I wanted to be there for her.

Now for me being on FaceBook is like being at a cocktail party full of people who have completely opposite opinions from me. I can talk about the weather and puppies and other non-controversial subjects. I can't talk about conservative topics because it of the very real danger of getting swarmed by angry leftist activists, not only online but in real life, since FB requires real identities.

Twitter doesn't require real identities, although for some prominent account holders it would award a coveted "verified" status to show that person was really who they claimed to be. Twitter also used to be pretty much a free speech arena. Anyone could say what they want. If you didn't like what they said, you could block them. You could report spammers. It was wonderfully disorganized and loud and basically a free-for-all. Then this year, around a week after the White House met with Silicon Valley executives, Twitter created that censorship council I talked about yesterday. Yesterday the Justice Department had another summit with Silicon Valley Executives to "discuss ways to counter the use of cyberspace by militant extremist
groups like Islamic State and support strategic counter-messaging
campaigns." Which sounds great, until you learn that FaceBook prohibits talking about the refugee crisis in Germany and Twitter bans users who attack feminism. All dissent is terrorism.

A month or so ago, one of the writers in an online group that I'm in suggested an alternative social network. It's a fledgling platform called MeWe. They claim to value privacy above all else, to never sell your information, and that they are ad-free. After looking around it for a while, I decided to sign up. So far it seems legit - still a small user base, and most of the action seems to revolve around groups. They are somewhat similar in set-up to Facebook. A lot of the groups seem conservative and libertarian. So I'm optimistic about it. If you join be sure to look me up.

I'd be interested to learn about other social media companies that are for privacy and free speech. Let me know what you think.

7 comments:

This is the second time this week that I was told you have to use your real name on FB. A couple of years ago, with our kids scattered, they nagged me into getting a FB account. I started one in the dogs name. It even has a fictious bio and her real picture. Everyone laughs, but I haven't been bothered by the FB moderators. I will look up MEWE, sounds good.

Yes, you can fly under the radar indefinitely on FB if your name doesn't sound fake, but if you come to the attention of the admins they can decide to lock your account until you produce a driver's license.

I've got an account under my fakename and it's so far escaped the banhammer. Possibly because I don't post with it very much. They do occasionally purge fakename accounts; my brother recently lost his account for it and had to come back under his real name.

I'm guessing your fakename is at least plausible and you don't get into flame wars. I have friends with fake names that are active, and I know a lot that had their fakename accounts shut down too. I think FB enforces it the same way lefties enforce all their rules - as a selective punitive tool.

This is the second time this week that I was told you have to use your real name on FB. A couple of years ago, with our kids scattered, they nagged me into getting a FB account. I started one in the dogs name. It even has a fictious bio and her real picture. Everyone laughs, but I haven't been bothered by the FB moderators. I will look up MEWE, sounds good.

It is in the FAQ actually, under How can MeWe be free and make money? https://mewe.com/faqBasic service up to 8GB is free and then you can buy more storage. They are also going to have pay add-ons on the apps and they say they will release an enterprise version. So like Dropbox & other companies - freemium - free basic stuff, pay for extras.Whether they can make a profit on this model remains to be seen.

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